Doing What's Right for Wind and Solar

When it comes to renewable energy, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Clean power just keeps winning and winning in the marketplace. According to the Energy Information Administration, wind and solar power made up 62% of new electric generating capacity to come online in 2019 and 76% in 2020. Through September of 2021, these two technologies made up 74%.

The reason is crystal clear: Across most of the country, wind and solar are simply less expensive than dirty fossil fuels. And costs for wind, solar and battery technologies continue to fall.

The second offshore wind farm started operations in 2021. It’s only 12 megawatts now, but the project, off the coast of Virginia, is on track to eventually be the world’s largest offshore wind farm. And the Bureau of Offshore Energy Management approved the first utility-scale offshore wind project, the Vineyard Wind 1 project, which will be 800 MW.

As humans, we’re wired to be nervous about change. So, it’s understandable that people have questions about wind and solar projects when they’re proposed in their backyards (or in the case of offshore wind, favorite ocean).

With this in mind, we are fighting to make sure all of this renewable energy is developed responsibly. We’re part of the American Wind Wildlife Institute, which will soon be changing its name to the Renewable Energy Wildlife Institute because it will be working on solar, too. For offshore wind, we helped launch the Regional Wildlife Science Entity. Both AWWI and RWSE are dedicated to driving the best science around how to avoid and minimize the wildlife impacts of renewables development.

Right now, we need lots of wind and solar to protect our communities and wildlife and all of their spiritual, moral, and economic value from climate change, and we have to protect those very same values while we deploy those renewables. We need to do this right, because this can be a negative spiral where poor sitting leads to growing opposition which in turn undermines wind and solar development, contributing to more severe climate change and biodiversity loss. Or this can be a beneficial spiral where we get the siting right and that helps grow public support and drives better policies, which leads to more renewables, a stabilizing climate, and protecting and restoring biodiversity.

We are making unprecedented progress with renewable energy, but we will need to do much, much more. Here's to keeping up the fight for a better future in 2022!

Nathanael Greene